† Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race: On the day that Barack Hussein Obama was inaugurated, The Stiletto noted that he isn’t “the country’s first African-American president”:

He’s America’s first biracial, first generation American president. The distinction is important to The Stiletto, because she too is a first-generation American – and members of her family are biracial.  

In that post, The Stiletto quoted EbonyJet.com writer Jennifer Brea, herself biracial, cheering Obama’s election because he would “help other blacks who come from multiracial backgrounds and immigrant communities to be comfortable in their own skins” and took a more measured view:

Now that he has the bully pulpit, if Obama can fully embrace his racial duality he can change the way we count and categorize people so that they no longer have to deny one half of their heritage. Until then, nothing will change in the day-to-day lives and self-definition of biracial American

As The Stiletto suspected, Obama cannot or will not embrace his whiteness – which disappoints  Washington Post writer Elizabeth Chang, who also considers him biracial and had “hoped that his election would help our country move beyond the tired concept of race”:

The federal government, finally heeding the desires of multiracial people to be able to accurately define themselves, had changed the rules in 2000, so he could have also checked white. Or he could have checked "some other race." Instead, Obama went with black alone.

Despite being raised by a white mother and white grandparents, despite have spent most of his childhood in the rainbow state of Hawaii, despite clearly being comfortable in almost any type of crowd (though I suppose Tea Partyers might give him pause), the president apparently considers himself only black. "I self-identify as an African American. That's how I am treated and that's how I am viewed. And I'm proud of it," he has said. But he also argued in his famous speech about race that he could no more disown the Reverend Jeremiah Wright "than I can my white grandmother." With his census choice, he has done precisely that. …

Obama, who has also referred to himself as a "mutt," made a big deal during the 2008 campaign of being able to relate to Hawaiians and Midwesterners, Harvard grads and salespeople, blacks, whites, Latinos, whatever - precisely because of his "unconventional" background and multicultural exposure. On the census, however, he has effectively said that when it counts, he is black.

Biracial twin filmmakers Allen and Albert Hughes (AKA “the Hughes Brothers”) share certain aspects of Obama’s childhood – notably, an unconventional white mother, a black father who skipped out on them when they were very young and white relatives who supported and nurtured them. But the similarities end there. Even though he is well aware that Hollywood "wanted to hear from us because we were black not because we were half Armenian," Albert explains that they refuse to choose between their father’s and mother’s DNA because “[w]hile the black side was not open to us because we were half white, the Armenian half always welcomed us”.  

In a USA Today interview Albert also said this about his dual heritage:

People were hailing us as the new school of black directors. I hated that. For one, we’re half Armenian, half black. For another, that’s offensive. We wouldn’t pose with other young black directors, because you wouldn’t do that with, say, Italian directors.   

For his part, in a recent Vanity Fair interview brother Allen jokes about “the tuft of Armenian hair” standing up on the back of his head when he read the script for “The Book of Eli.”

Rather than looking to Obama to lead the country towards the post-racial future that has proved elusive – if not illusory - Brea and Chang should look to the Hughes Brothers.

† Living In These Mad, Mad, Madoff Times: You’ve heard of the ‘49ers – those intrepid folks who came to CA with dreams of striking gold. Today, CA is home to 99ers – people who have been getting unemployment insurance checks for 99 weeks and have exhausted their benefits, reports the Los Angeles Times:

Worried that they could lose their homes and get put out on the street, thousands of "99ers," as they call themselves, are banding together to agitate for another extension. On Friday they're kicking off a "Mayday SOS" campaign, faxing and e-mailing Congress their resumes, along with pleas for more benefits.

"The have-nots are going to be in great multitudes, and they will uprise," said Donalee King, 51, of San Diego, who runs an Internet radio forum dedicated to the cause.

A series of extensions passed by Congress in 2008 and 2009 prolonged the benefits for an unprecedented period: 99 weeks in states with high unemployment, such as California. There have never been benefits available for so long, said Loree Levy, spokeswoman for the state Employment Development Department.

The last extension was approved in November 2009, giving the unemployed an extra 20 weeks of checks. But people eligible for those additional weeks are losing their benefits now, and a further extension is considered unlikely given the massive federal budget deficit.

That's left the 99ers to fend for themselves. In interviews, people who have recently lost their benefits say they are pursuing a variety of strategies, including turning to family members for help, putting expenses on credit cards and applying for food stamps and other social services.

† Eat My Shorts: Goldman Sachs E-Mails: Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi nicely sums up the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations dog-and-pony show:

On Wall Street, they learn to rationalize excessive risk in the name of excessive greed.

In Washington, they learn how to take money from the Wall Street risk-takers and then look the other way as they game the system.

But the Obama administration wants it to be known that it isn’t fooling around when it comes to the greedy shenanigans at Goldman Sachs, reports sister paper The New York Times: “The Securities and Exchange Commission, which two weeks ago filed a civil fraud suit against Goldman, referred its investigation to prosecutors for the Southern District of New York, which has now opened its own inquiry.”  

† Updates To Previous Posts (second item, Wind Farms Good For The Environment – But Bad For Property Values): As The Stiletto predicted, Sen. Ted Kennedy would lose the battle over construction of a wind farm in Nantucket Sound, and he was still alive at the time! The Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound - a group of anti-sustainable energy (in this case, anyway) activists - vows to go to court to stop Cape Wind Associates from building the 130-turbine wind farm that got a green light from U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

† Updates To Previous Posts (fifth item, What Freedom Of Speech Means To Muslims (The U.S. Edition):  Seventeen Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonists have signed a petition to condemn threats against Matt Stone and Trey Parker by radical Islamist group Revolution Muslim, because "freedom of expression is a universal right."  All well and good, but the part of the petition that refers to our Constitutional rights of free speech (“In the United States we have a proud tradition of political satire and believe in the right to speak or draw freely without censorship”) should have been directed to Comedy Central, which did the actual censoring of the episode and has pulled all “South Park” episodes that reference Mohammad off its Web site. The  cartoonists who signed the petition include liberals and conservatives: Nick Anderson, Tony Auth, Clay Bennett, Steve Benson, Matt Davies, Fiore, Jack Higgins, David Horsey, Jim Morin, Mike Peters, Joel Pett, Michael Ramirez, Ben Sargent, Paul Szep, Ann Telnaes, Trudeau and Signe Wilkinson.

† Updates To Previous Posts (third item, Reality Check: Part IV): Reacting to media reports of Republican trophy hunting, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tim Kaine characterized the GOP as the gang that couldn’t shoot straight ("We know who our leader is. It's the president.") and predicted his party “can do an awful lot better than the historic norm - and certainly better than what's been predicted by some of the doom-and-gloom prognosticators" in November’s mid-term elections.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, Nationalized Healthcare Always Leads To Rationing): A five-physician practice in Philadelphia with 8,440 patients analyzed its electronic medical records system and what the doctors learned helps explain why  primary care “is an increasingly unpopular field,” reports The Washington Post:

In addition to seeing patients, a primary-care physician each day must address more than three dozen urgent but uncompensated tasks, according to a study that provides a rare, quantitative look into the mechanics of office practice.

Answering telephone calls and e-mail messages, refilling prescriptions, reviewing lab test results and consulting with other doctors consume large amounts of time each day, even though none of it is paid for, according to the study.

Richard J. Baron, the 56-year-old internist who conducted the study, tells The WaPo: “Like everybody else who practices primary care, I feel like I'm running from when I get there to when I leave and take work home. But when I actually saw the numbers of all the tasks, I was really stunned.” Think of what adding 32 million more patients into the system over the next 10 years will do to the efforts of Baron and other primary care physicians to give every patient the time and attention (s)he deserves.

† Updates To Previous Posts (ninth item, Is Obama’s Birth Certificate Fake?): The AZ House voted 31-29 to pass a bill that requires presidential candidates to  show their birth certificates to get on the state's 2012 ballot, but with several Republicans joining all 12 Democrats in the state Senate in opposing the bill, it is unlikely to come up for a vote before legislators adjourn their 2010 regular session next week.

† Updates To Previous Posts (last item, Employers Hiring Forged Documented Aliens Are Lawbreakers In Other Ways, Too): After Attorneys general Nicholas Katzenbach and Edwin Meese III sent a letter to Chief Judge Linda Reade of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Iowa arguing that sentencing former Agriprocessors manager Sholom Rubashkin to life on 86 counts of bank fraud and money laundering was excessive, prosecutors asked for a 25 year sentence instead.

† Updates To Previous Posts (eighth item, A Court Of Law, Not Of Justice): Former Luzerne County Judge Michael Conahan will plead guilty to taking kickbacks for every juvenile he convicted and funneled to two private juvenile detention facilities between 2003 and 2008, reports The Associated Press:

The charge to which Conahan will plead guilty carries a maximum sentence of 20 years and a $250,000 fine. He must also surrender his law license. Prosecutors agreed to drop all other counts, including fraud, money laundering, extortion and bribery, and recommend a sentence reduction if the former judge accepts responsibility for his conduct.

Conahan’s plea deal does not require him to testify against (alleged) co-conspirator former judge, Mark Ciavarella Jr., who maintains his innocence and plans to go to trial.